2008-08-28

Time Machine freezes computer

I let Time Machine backup into a sparse bundle on a windows share. This worked a little slow but otherwise fine until yesterday when Time Machine froze my MacBook every time it ran. To get it back running, I had to turn off the MacBook by holding down the power key for a few seconds. After restart, Mac OS told me the reason: a kernel panic with this backtrace:

After some web search [1], I found out that the reason was probably a defect sparse bundle caused by turning off my computer during backups, which I sometimes do. So the solution was to repair the sparse bundle:

I mounted the windows share on which my Time Machine sparse bundle lies.Then, I executed the following commands in the terminal:

Make the sparse bundle available as a device (in my case, it was /dev/disk1, but hdiutil tells you, which device it assigns the sparse bundle to): hdiutil attach -nomount -readwrite /Volumes/windows_share/my.sparsebundle

Über mich

I am a PhD student at the department of computer science at the Humboldt-University Berlin, Germany. My thesis topic is "Test-Driven Language Modeling". You can read more about it on my professional homepage.